Echocardiography is used to diagnose cardiac disease related to heart motion. Among types of cardiac diseases diagnosed by employing echocardiography are disease involving regional motion, septal wall motion, and valvular motion abnormalities. Echocardiography provides images of cardiac structures and the movements of these structures, providing detailed anatomical and functional information about the functioning and health of the heart. These echocardiographs are taken from several standard viewpoints, such as apical 4-chamber view, parastemal long-axis view, parastemal short axis, and apical 2-chamber view.
Doctors regularly employ echocardiography as an aid to diagnosing disease. However, discerning motion abnormalities is difficult. For example, detecting when the myocardium contracts significantly less than the rest of the tissue is difficult because, unlike the interpretation of static images like X-rays, it is difficult for the human eye to describe and quantify the nature of an abnormality in a moving tissue. Thus, tools that automate the disease discrimination process by capturing and quantifying the complex three-dimensional non-rigid spatio-temporal heart motion can aid in disease detection.